He was slow with the agony of his exhaustion, and when he lunged after the rustle of sound there was nothing there.
He cursed softly and groped about. Only the tarred roof met his searching fingers.
Then he heard a little crackle of sound from several feet away.
Stroebling, stealing away from him across the ancient dried-out tar, gliding off into the hell-sent inexplicable darkness.
The roof creaked as Nick moved. He pulled off his shoes and crept silently over the time-worn tar.
There was no longer any sound from Stroebling.
Only absolute silence. Absolute blackness.
No, not absolute silence. On the roof with him, yes; but not down on the street below. Automobile horns, plenty of them; a police whistle blowing; people shouting. But nothing up here.
His gliding feet kicked against something. He bent to touch it. Two somethings. Stroebling’s shoes.
So he, too, was stalking in deliberate silence. Creeping about the roof to lay ambush for Nick. Or maybe find the open doorway to the inner stairs.
Nick sent his mind through the darkness, remembering. The door had been about fifteen feet to his right and six feet behind him when all the lights went out. So now it would be about twelve feet behind him and ten feet to the right.
Or would Stroebling try the fire escape? Or was he waiting for a sound from Nick?
Nick froze… waited… listened — and thought.
The lights could come on again at any minute, any second. Stroebling would think that, too. So now he was probably trying to figure out his best bet — make for the stairs and a getaway, or find cover on the roof from which he could leap out and attack as soon as the lights came back.
What cover? There was the housing for the upper stairway landing, the housing for the elevators, and the water tank. And that was about it. But it was enough.
Nick’s own best bet, he figured, was to head for the stairway door and wait there.
He moved silently through the darkness, probing it with his senses, listening for Stroebling, counting paces.
It was incredibly dark. There was little room in his mind for idle thought but he could not help wondering what had caused the blackout and why it was so oppressive. Power failure, sure, but— He sniffed the air. Dampness in it. And fumes. Smog. He had been occupied to take conscious note of it before. But the pollution in the air was almost tangible. It was like Los Angeles at its worst, like Pittsburgh before the clean-up, like London during that one lethal season when four thousand people had died of the filth in the air.
His eyes were smarting from it and his lungs were clogged with it. Strange, he thought.
But where the hell was Stroebling?
Nick’s fingers touched a wall and slid along it. The doorway to the stairwell should be about here…
The sound came from yards away. A latch was clicking, softly at first, and then louder as if it were resisting. He pivoted.
What the devil! Could he have been so wrong about the door?
He moved quickly toward the sound, lightly on the balls of his feet, cautiously in case of a trap.
The sound got louder and a door wrenched open.
He was swearing as he reached it. Stroebling was through the door and on his way and in the darkness he would get away…. But one corner of his mind nagged Nick with a question.
How come Stroebling had had to wrestle with the door? It had been open.
His answer came with the sound of something splintering and a breath of warm, greasy air and a scream, that began on a high, piercing note that crescendoed, echoing, lowering, thinning out like a wailing siren fast fading into the distance — and then ending.
He could not be sure, but he thought he heard a thud from very far below.
The warm, greasy air of the open elevator shaft blew gently into his face and he was suddenly damp with sweat.
He closed the door and turned away, shaken. So the blackout that had so nearly offered escape to Stroebling had taken him instead.
One blackout, one old building, one ancient and ill-guarded elevator housing, and the trail was ended.
There was a faint suggestion of light rising from the sky to the east. He made for it, treading carefully through the blackness until he came to a wall and looked over it to the city below.
Tiny threads of light flickered in several windows. Two low buildings — hospital and firehouse, he thought — were brightly lit. Headlights shone in the streets. Here and there, a flashlight poked its beam into the gloom.
That was all. The Loop was black. The shores of Lake Michigan lay under a dark shroud. To the south, west, north, east, all was darkness but for a rare pin point of light or small glowworm sparks that made the darkness even darker.
Another one, he thought. Another one of those blackouts that they said could never happen again.
But at the moment all it meant to him was the need to drag his tired body down twenty-three flights of stairs in search of a telephone, a drink, a bed and sleep. Ami it marked the close of the case of Heinrich Stroebling.
He did not know it at the time, but it marked the opening of another.
Jimmy Jones was too young to read the newspapers, not too young to understand the words, but too young to care. Batman was his speed. And Batman had not been in Chicago the night before last, so Jimmy didn’t know that all of Chicago and its suburbs and much of the state of Illinois and some parts of the neighboring states had been blacked out for five long hours before the lights had suddenly, inexplicably, come on again. Nor did he know that, a year ago almost to the day, a boy a little older than himself had walked along a road in New Hampshire doing exactly what Jimmy was doing now on this chilly night in Maine.
Jimmy was on his way home to supper and he was swinging a stick. The sun was down and he was cold and there were some funny flashing lights in the sky that made him feel a little bit scared. So he swung his stick to make himself feel tough, and he whacked it against the trees alongside the road, and he whacked it against the light poles.
He hit two light poles and nothing happened except for the satisfying sound of the stick going thwack against the poles.
When he hit the third pole the light went out.
“Oh, Kee-rist!” he said guiltily, and stared down the dark road leading home.
All the lights had gone out. All the lights along the road and all the lights in the town ahead.
“Jeeze!” he breathed. “Oh, Jeeze, I really done it now!”
He started to run in the darkness.
He forgot all about the weird flashing lights in the sky.
But the people in his darkened home town saw them when their own lights went out and some of those people were a little uneasy. And some of them were unashamedly afraid.
Three days later in the Rocky Mountains, Ranger Horace Smith got out of his jeep to stretch his legs and admire his second favorite piece of scenery. The first was Alice, and she was home in Boulder; the second was Elkhorn Reservoir, usually crusted over with ice at this time of year but so far still rippling and blue under the near-winter sky.
Kind of warm for this time of year, he told himself as he tramped between the tall trees and around the natural rock wall that cut the dam off from the sight of passing tourists. Wouldn’t be at all surprised if there wasn’t something in that idea that the Russians are interfering with our weather. Next thing you know, they’ll be melting the Arctic ice cap to turn Siberia into a blooming desert and flood the eastern seaboard.
Well, anyway, they couldn’t touch the Rockies and the cool blue stretch of water that he loved so much.
He climbed over a pile of rock and rounded the last big boulder. His dam lay ahead, calm and beautiful under the midday sun. He gazed at it lovingly.
And felt a sudden, awful sensation as though his mind had snapped.